Author: Théophile Niyitegeka

{A team of researchers from Cleveland Clinic and New York University School of Medicine have found that obesity resulted in as much as 47 percent more life-years lost than tobacco, and tobacco caused similar life-years lost as high blood pressure.}

Preliminary work presented by Cleveland Clinic at the 2017 Society of General Internal Medicine Annual Meeting analyzed the contribution of modifiable behavioral risk factors to causes-of-death in the U.S. population, using 2014 data.

Based on this preliminary work, the team found the greatest number of preventable life-years lost were due to (in order from greatest to least) obesity, diabetes, tobacco use, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. However, researchers also noted that some individuals may have needs that are very different than those of the broader U.S. population. For an obese and alcoholic patient, for example, alcohol use may be more important to address than obesity, even though obesity has a greater impact on the population.

Results highlight the clinical and public health achievement of smoking cessation efforts because 15 years ago, tobacco would have topped the list.

“Modifiable behavioral risk factors pose a substantial mortality burden in the U.S.,” said Glen Taksler, Ph.D., internal medicine researcher from Cleveland Clinic and lead author of the study. “These preliminary results continue to highlight the importance of weight loss, diabetes management and healthy eating in the U.S. population.”

A key takeaway is that three (diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol) of the top five causes of death can be treated, so helping patients understand treatment options and approaches can have a powerful impact on life-years. The results also highlight the importance of preventive care in clinical practice and why it should be a priority for physicians.

To estimate the number of life-years lost to each modifiable risk factor, researchers examined the change in mortality for a series of hypothetical U.S. populations that each eliminated a single risk factor. They compared the results with the change in life-years lost for an “optimal” population that eliminated all modifiable risk factors. Recognizing that some less common factors might place substantial burden on small population subgroups, they also estimated life expectancy gained in individuals with each modifiable risk factor.

“The reality is, while we may know the proximate cause of a patient’s death, for example, breast cancer or heart attack, we don’t always know the contributing factor(s), such as tobacco use, obesity, alcohol and family history. For each major cause of death, we identified a root cause to understand whether there was a way a person could have lived longer.”

Dr. Taksler and colleagues are continuing to conduct research in this area, and analyze and refine results.

Source:Science Daily

{Researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a first-of-its-kind nanoparticle vaccine immunotherapy that targets several different cancer types.}

The nanovaccine consists of tumor antigens — tumor proteins that can be recognized by the immune system — inside a synthetic polymer nanoparticle. Nanoparticle vaccines deliver minuscule particulates that stimulate the immune system to mount an immune response. The goal is to help people’s own bodies fight cancer.

“What is unique about our design is the simplicity of the single-polymer composition that can precisely deliver tumor antigens to immune cells while stimulating innate immunity. These actions result in safe and robust production of tumor-specific T cells that kill cancer cells,” said Dr. Jinming Gao, a Professor of Pharmacology and Otolaryngology in UT Southwestern’s Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center.

A study outlining this research, published online in Nature Nanotechnology, reported that the nanovaccine had anti-tumor efficacy in multiple tumor types in mice.

The research was a collaboration between the laboratories of study senior authors Dr. Gao and Dr. Zhijian “James” Chen, Professor of Molecular Biology and Director of the Center for Inflammation Research. The Center was established in 2015 to study how the body senses infection and to develop approaches to exploit this knowledge to create new treatments for infection, immune disorders, and autoimmunity.

Typical vaccines require immune cells to pick up tumor antigens in a “depot system” and then travel to the lymphoid organs for T cell activation, Dr. Gao said. Instead, nanoparticle vaccines can travel directly to the body’s lymph nodes to activate tumor-specific immune responses.

“For nanoparticle vaccines to work, they must deliver antigens to proper cellular compartments within specialized immune cells called antigen-presenting cells and stimulate innate immunity,” said Dr. Chen, also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and holder of the George L. MacGregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science. “Our nanovaccine did all of those things.”

In this case, the experimental UTSW nanovaccine works by activating an adaptor protein called STING, which in turn stimulates the body’s immune defense system to ward off cancer.

The scientists examined a variety of tumor models in mice: melanoma, colorectal cancer, and HPV-related cancers of the cervix, head, neck, and anogenital regions. In most cases, the nanovaccine slowed tumor growth and extended the animals’ lives.

Other vaccine technologies have been used in cancer immunotherapy. However, they are usually complex — consisting of live bacteria or multiplex biological stimulants, Dr. Gao said. This complexity can make production costly and, in some cases, lead to immune-related toxicities in patients.

With the emergence of new nanotechnology tools and increased understanding of polymeric drug delivery, Dr. Gao said, the field of nanoparticle vaccines has grown and attracted intense interest from academia and industry in the past decade.

“Recent advances in understanding innate and adaptive immunity have also led to more collaborations between immunologists and nanotechnologists,” said Dr. Chen. “These partnerships are critical in propelling the rapid development of new generations of nanovaccines.”

The investigative team is now working with physicians at UT Southwestern to explore clinical testing of the STING-activating nanovaccines for a variety of cancer indications. Combining nanovaccines with radiation or other immunotherapy strategies such as “checkpoint inhibition” can further augment their anti-tumor effectiveness.

Source:Science Daily

{Your Saturday Salsa club or Introductory Italian class might be even better for you than you thought.}

According to Sandia National Laboratories cognitive scientist Mike Trumbo, learning a language or an instrument or going dancing is the best way to keep your brain keen despite the ravages of time. Not only do you enhance your cognition but you also learn a skill and have fun.

Several commercial enterprises have claimed you can get cognitive benefits from brain training games intended to enhance working memory. Working memory is the amount of information you can hold and manipulate in your mind at one time, said cognitive scientist Laura Matzen. However, a burgeoning body of research shows working memory training games don’t provide the benefits claimed. A study by Trumbo, Matzen and six colleagues published in Memory and Cognition shows evidence that working memory training actually impairs other kinds of memory.

On the other hand, studies have shown that learning another language can help school-age children do better in math and can delay the onset of dementia in older adults. Also going dancing regularly is the best protection against dementia compared to 16 different leisure activities, such as doing crossword puzzles and bicycling. Playing board games and practicing a musical instrument are the next best activities for keeping the mind sharp. Dancing is probably so effective because it combines cognitive exertion, physical exercise and social interaction, said Trumbo.

New research from Sandia published in Neuropsychologia shows that working memory training combined with a kind of noninvasive brain stimulation can lead to cognitive improvement under certain conditions. Improving working memory or cognitive strategies could be very valuable for training people faster and more efficiently.

“The idea for why brain stimulation might work when training falls short is because you’re directly influencing brain plasticity in the regions that are relevant to working memory task performance. If you’re improving connectivity in a brain region involved in working memory, then you should get transfer to other tasks to the extent that they rely on that same brain region,” said Trumbo. “Whereas when you’re having people do tasks in the absence of brain stimulation, it’s not clear if you’re getting this general improvement in working memory brain areas. You might be getting very selective, task kind of improvements.”

Matzen cautioned that research using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to improve cognitive performance is relatively new, and the field has produced mixed results. More research is needed to understand how best to use this technology.

Neurons that fire together wire together

Using more than 70 volunteers divided into six groups, the researchers used different combinations of working memory training with transcranial direct current stimulation. Then they assessed the volunteers’ performance on working memory tests and a test of problem-solving ability.

Using electrodes placed on the scalp and powered by a 9-volt battery, a tDCS unit delivers weak constant current through the skull to the brain tissue below. According to Trumbo, most people feel some mild tingling, itching or heat under the electrode for the first few minutes. There are well-established safety guidelines for tDCS research, ensuring that the procedure is safe and comfortable for participants and this research was approved by Sandia’s Human Studies Board and the University of New Mexico’s Institutional Review Board. There are commercial tDCS devices already on the market.

Researchers think tDCS makes neurons a little bit more likely to fire, which can help speed up the formation of neuronal connections and thus learning, said Matzen. Though the exact mechanisms aren’t well understood, its potential is. According to studies, tDCS can help volunteers remember people’s names, is better than caffeine at keeping Air Force personnel awake and may even help fight depression.

Brain stimulation and brain training: better together?

In the Sandia-led study, the volunteers played verbal or spatial memory training games for 30 minutes while receiving stimulation to the left or right forehead. That part of the brain is called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and is involved in working memory and reasoning. Since the right hemisphere is involved in spatial tasks and the left hemisphere is involved in verbal tasks, the researchers thought volunteers who received stimulation on the right side while training on spatial tasks would improve on spatial tests and those who received stimulation on the left side while training on verbal tasks would improve on verbal tests.

The verbal task involved remembering if a letter had appeared three letters back in a string of letters, for instance A-C-B-A-D. The spatial task was similar but involved remembering the sequence that blocks appear in a grid.

As expected, the spatial/right group got better at the spatial test but not verbal or reasoning tests. The spatial/left group performed about the same as the volunteers that received mock stimulation. The verbal/left group got better at the verbal test but not spatial or reasoning tests.

However, the results from the verbal/right group were surprising, said Trumbo. This group got better at the trained task — remembering strings of letters — as well as the closely related task — remembering the sequence of boxes in a grid. They also improved on a reasoning test. The sample size was small, with only 12 volunteers, but the improvements were statistically significant, said Matzen.

One explanation Trumbo offered is that the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is particularly involved in strategy use during tasks. By stimulating the right side during the verbal task, the volunteers might get better at using a strategy. The tDCS improves the connections of these neurons, which leads to enhanced ability to use this strategy, even on other tasks.

He added, “We did not explicitly collect data related to strategy use, so it is kind of an open question. I’d really like to do some follow-up work.”

If tDCS can reliably enhance working memory or cognitive strategies, it could be very useful for training people faster and more efficiently. Matzen said, “This could benefit many mission areas at Sandia where people must learn complex tools and systems. Reducing training time and improving cognitive performance would have substantial benefits to overall system performance.”

Source:Science Daily